That's tolerable when the establishment knows what they're saying, like in science articles. Well, mostly. Unfortunately this policy gets extended to domains without anything resembling genuine experts, and nowhere is it more ridiculous than with "film critics".

It's one thing to mindlessly parrot some social scientist who fudges statistics and uses questionable methodology, but is at least pretending to do science. Treating someone speaking out of their ass as a "reliable source" just because someone gave them a newspaper column to publish at is a mockery of what Wikipedia used to stand for in its early days.

There is an objective measure of film quality - enjoyment by the audience. And we have pretty good metrics of that - like IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes audience score. Such metrics occasionally suffer from issues like vote stuffing, demographic imbalance of voters compared with movie watching audience, less representative sampling for very old or foreign movies, and occasional overrating of most recent movies before it regresses to the mean, but it's insanity not to take these aggregates as starting points.

I don't always agree with all them - for example I tend to enjoy superhero movies which don't take themselves too seriously more, so personally I find Doctor Strange overrated, and Iron Man 2-3 underrated.

But don't mind me, statistically speaking you're far more likely to enjoy what other people enjoy than what some cat blogger or film critic likes. All I can do is provide a bit of context for those numbers.

Really good movies

There's a lot of options where to start. Movies establishing new characters like Iron Man and Guardians of the Galaxy, which are also really good on their own, are probably the best place. If you're completely new to MCU, these are just the two I'd recommend starting with. If you don't like them, I doubt you'd like the rest anyway.

Thor and Captain America have some good movies, unfortunately their first movies are rather mediocre. So you can either start with their first weak movie because it gets better eventually, or just read its plot summary and get straight to the better ones. Nobody will blame you for skipping early Thors, honest.

Watchable movies

These movies are still pretty good, and they mostly don't require watching anything before.

Notable here is Black Panther, which due to the nearly all-black cast became inevitable battleground of culture wars. It's decent movie, but it's massively overrated by the overwhelmingly liberal film critics, and this generates a bit of audience backlash. It's definitely far better than the trainwreck Wonder Woman was, but every single MCU movie is far better than Wonder Woman, even Thor 1.

Forgettable movies

Unless you're really invested in the MCU, it's probably best to skip them. Personally I quite enjoyed Iron Man 2-3 movies, but I definitely have preference for sillier movies that most people don't share, and I can totally see why they did not get universal aclaim.

None of them are key to anything, and a huge added benefit of skipping them all is avoiding Natalie Portman, who according to some is the most annoying actress in Hollywood [citation needed].

So that's it for today. If you know of anyone who's working on an encyclopedia which follows Neutral Point of View, please let me know.

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